Explainer: How are Themes, Layouts and Slide Masters Interrelated?

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Is PowerPoint a premade design tool? Just a magic black box where you click and your presentation gets transformed? Or can you control how the designs are applied and make changes to meet your artistic vision? Hi, this is Les. And in this roughly six minute explainer, I’m going to take the covers off, and we can see how PowerPoint operate by understanding the interrelationship between design themes and slide layout, and the powerful slide masters. First concept, design themes. design themes is the core tool that will quickly transform a full slide deck with a single mouse click. As a refresher, let me jump over to a basic presentation to show it in practice. Here is a simple 10 Page slide deck built from an outline. Going into the design Ribbon Menu, I’m presented with many pre built design themes. Clicking on any one of the themes, my Slides are changed to match color schemes, font typography, background, graphic layout locations, each click completely redesigned the metamorphosis of the look. But, if we examine more closely, we see specific slight variations, such as a center title, versus a top of the page title, or some Slides, there’s just a single text box, while this one has two side by side text boxes. How did that happen? A design theme comprises a collection of distinctly structured slide layouts. Each slide will be assigned a specific layout, such as a title slide, or a two content layout. And the design instructions will be applied to just that one slide. The overall color scheme, typography remains the same for the whole collection. But the font sizes and the object placeholders are rearranged based on the selected layout rules. Look at it in action. To see what layout is assigned, plus how to change the applied layout. Go to the Home Ribbon Menu and look for the drop down box called layouts. Depending on the currently selected slide, the layout choices will show just one option highlighted. In our case, slide one is a title slide. Hey Mac users, this is going to look the same for you too. Now watch carefully as I reassigned a new layout of Title and Content to slide number one. Again, it radically transforms, losing the large graphic element and arranging the text placeholder location on the page. Now watch slide two, which is the normal title and content layout, right assign the title slide layout, which looks unnatural has typically you don’t have multiple bullet points on a title slide. Lastly, there are many more layouts to choose from. Look at this slide number 10, which is a two content side by side layout. More can be designed. Before I go too far. Let me go up and reassign the layout to the first two Slides back to where we started. So now we know how to apply different layouts to control the overall look of a specific slide. But that does not explain how to manage design elements of each slide layout template, what makes them look the way they do. And for that answer, I introduce slide masters.

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Digging into Slide Master tool, we can reconfigure any layout template that will ripple the changes through the presentation. Or we can even find the one master parents slide, that controls the whole collection layout, which will change the presentation with that single update. Let’s look. To open up the tool, click on the View menu and switch to Slide Master view. Here on the left is the full collection of the earlier slide layouts. Look as I hover my mouse over the single Slide Master layout called timeline content, we see that it is that layout plus we also see at the end, which Slides this layout is applied to in this specific presentation. Now watch what happens when I change this layout by inserting a star symbol just once and changing the specific layout once we see it impact all the Slides tied to that single layout. When to exit out of the Slide Master View, we see that the star is on six Slides using the title and content layout. If a different layout is in use, such as this two content layout, then there is no star since we only change that title content layout. Now let’s go back and see a bigger change. View and Slide Master. And now I’m going to scroll up to the top of all my layout. And there we find that top parent master slide layout, that is the master over all the below layouts. Make a change here, that’s going to flow through the whole presentation. See how the new text is on this slide except on some of the layouts that have a graphical element on top covering the text below it. Now, let’s pull all these elements together. Design Themes are a way to apply our Slide Master graphical configuration to a complete presentation slide deck. The Slide Master is a collection of layouts that have been carefully formatted to bring to life a graphical collection of colors, typography, backgrounds, and Object layouts once built, or you could use the PowerPoint pre made designs. The vision of the Slide Master can then be applied to each individual slide by way of the slide layout that can be chosen to meet the individual needs of that specific slide. And there you go. The concept explainer for Design Themes, Layouts and Master Slides. But if you now want to go put these tools to work, go watch our next how to tutorials on all about the Slide Master and then go to our Advanced Slide Master class, we’re gonna learn how to create a complete unique style of your own vision with these tools. So until next time, Go Power Up!